Through technology, improved advertising can be personalized and targeted to the particular viewer of a website. However, interest-based advertising requires the coordination of many systems before a merchant can advertise on a publisher's website.
Often, a merchant, i.e., an advertiser, will use an advertising (ad) agency to manage its advertising and a website developer to create and maintain its website. An ad agency typically uses a demand-side platform (DSP), which is a system that allows the ad agency to manage buying advertising space from multiple sources (such as ad exchanges), direct publisher relationships, and integrate data from data brokers through one interface. However, for the DSP to function properly, the website developer may often need to modify the merchant's website. Integration on the merchant's website can allow the DSP to track “conversions” (shoppers who click on advertisements), which can provide insight into an ad campaign's effectiveness. Advertiser website integration can also allow the DSP to build audiences that can be used in the DSP's bidder to buy media on many different publishers.
Additionally, the DSP's bidder can be set to only bid for ad space when the consumer matches an audience list collected from the advertiser's website. Buying based on an audience list collected from the advertiser's website can be referred to as retargeting or dynamic remarketing. Through remarketing, the advertiser can try to re-engage an audience that already visited their website.
Ad exchanges, and other types of demand/supply intermediaries, are technology platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of advertising from multiple DSPs, ad networks, and advertisers. Additionally, data aggregators use data management platforms (DMPs) to provide the ability to bring in audience list/segments from third-party sources that are not from the advertiser. Data aggregators are companies that gather data from multiple sources to build audience segments/lists based on interests (e.g., frequent travelers).
Ad networks are organizations that aggregate available ad space from web site publishers. The website publishers use a supply side platform (SSP), which is a technology platform that provides outsourced media selling and ad exchange/network management services for publishers. For each system to work with the other systems in the advertising chain, various conventions must be followed, which can require the allocation of vast resources. Further, to remain relevant, constantly updating the advertisements can be needed. Existing approaches can be brittle and/or slow to implement.
Many current systems can be brittle such that, while it can be possible to get dynamic remarketing working on a site initially, the dynamic remarketing can break when the advertising script placement or syntax is modified. Similarly, the remarketing strategies can break when the script remains in place and functioning, but values are not updated to reflect new or changed inventory being sold through a merchant's website. Whenever inventory changes, the DSP can require specific values that classify the inventory to be manually input into the merchant's website. Decreased advertising campaign performance is typically the only indication that the values going into the script are invalid.
There are continuing efforts to improve interest-based advertising technology.